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You’ve probably seen Arnold everywhere already. It’s used in your favourite film, TV and adverts including Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Gravity, Fantastic Beasta and Where To Find Them, Logan, Westworld, Trollhunters and more. With an efficient raytraced curve primitive, Arnold is the perfect choice for rendering fur and hair as it utilises very little memory. And, with a hair shader that has double offset speculars and transmissions, it’s no surprise to find that it’s also specifically designed to reduce flickering of thin hairs.

Arnold’s sub-surface scattering approach, meanwhile, makes tuning point clouds a thing of the past. Using it is effortless, requires no additional memory, supports motion-blurred lighting, interactive lighting and its performance scales optimally as more CPU threads are used.

Used by 300 studios worldwide including ILM Framestore, Image Engine, The Mill, Dreamworks and much more, the advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing renderer built for the demands of feature-length animation and visual effects. Originally co-developed with Sony Pictures Imageworks and now their main renderer, Arnold is also available as a stand-alone renderer and as a plugin for Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini, Cinema 4D, Katana and Softimage.

Logan – Image Engine

“Arnold gives us outstanding image quality and the ease of set up that today’s productions demand. I’m thrilled we are able to add it to the arsenal of tools at ILM,” says John Knoll, ILM.

And it’s easy to see why.

Thanks to a C++ API with Python bindings, TDs and programmers can integrate Arnold in external applications, and create custom shaders, cameras, light filters and output drivers. Arnold has also been integrated into many apps, both commercial and proprietary.

Arnold has been carefully multi-threaded to make optimal use of all available CPU threads. Even for traditionally single-threaded operations such as loading of procedural geometry, displacement or ray accel construction. Hyper-threading provides a solid 20% speedup.

Not only that, Arnold is also incredibly speed efficient, thanks to a compact and highly optimised data structures, you can render scenes with hundreds of millions of unique primitives quickly and with a much lower memory footprint than is possible with other renderers.

“Arnold has been a revelation both in the minimal time required for us to port all our pipeline to support it, and in the ease by which our lighters have switched to using it,” says Martin Preston, Framestore.

Arnold is a powerful tool for creatives, too and is capable of rendering any number of AOVs or passes for compositing purposes, including normal, Z-depth, position and ID masks. It also supports deep image data. Shaders can create their own custom outputs (such as direct and indirect diffuse, specular, SSS and so on).

For incredible volumetrics, Arnold has you covered with a volumetric rendering system based on proprietary importance sampling algorithms that can render effects such as smoke, clouds, fog, pyroclastic flow or fire. Volumes interact with direct and indirect lighting from arbitrary area light sources. Supports OpenVDB and MayaFluids.